Hand tools for making musical instruments have changed little over the centuries. The tools used by the great Mahler, Tieffenbrucker, Frei, Stradivari and Amati are indeed very similar than the ones we use today. I enjoy working with quality hand tools, taking good care of them, understanding their peculiarities. They help me reach a high level of precision impossible to achieve with electric tools. The most important hand tools are hand planes of many kinds and sizes, chisels and scrapers.

I have also made some of those tools myself for very specific tasks related to lute building.

I only make use of the most basic machines to help build my instruments and only in the first stages of construction. They are basically used to process big planks or slabs of wood into smaller more manageable pieces that will be the rough parts of the instruments. For this a bandsaw is generally used. Another very important machine is the lathe with which the pegs are made.